Friday, 8 December 2017

A royal connection does wonders for business

I’ve been enamoured with Meghan Markle ever since I started watching Suits on Netflix about a year ago. The lawyers may have been playing the lead roles, but it was the paralegal who took your eye in most episodes.

Well mine anyway.

And so I am full of admiration for Harry, but then again that’s what prince’s do, don't they? They marry the most beautiful women in the world. And they don’t have to be handsome princes either; think Prince Charles.

But I am delighted that blood other than blue is now going to invade the royal gene pool.

Meghan’s mother is an African-American and her dad is of European extraction.

The current royal bloodline has large dollops of German lineage; much of the history of how this came about is hidden by Royal decree because we, the great unwashed, might get upset if we got to know some of the scurrilous background.

But we mustn’t get too excited about the potential change. Markle sound uncommonly like Merkel so she might just be strengthening the existing bloodline as well as infiltrating strains from the African continent.

And I do have a warning for Harry.

Dr Hook and his merry band of medicine men once warned in a mega-hit that if you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard. Hook reckoned everybody wants her, everybody loves her and everybody wants to take her home.

Well Harry’s taken her home, but he’ll need to watch his Ps and Qs. (I’m talking Philip and the Queen here, by the way.)

So where to now? Well there’ll be the wedding of course, beamed worldwide to an audience of multi-millions, our womenfolk will painstakingly pore over the wedding dress and the bridesmaid’s frocks, and Ed Sheeran will probably croon a love song in St George’s Chapel before he shifts permanently to New Zealand.

Meghan will take all this in her stride; she’s been there and done that, unlike any other royal in modern times. She recently passed muster with a stunning performance with her betrothed when they did a walk-by amid fawning crowds in Nottingham. The handbag she was carrying has apparently gone viral and the small Scottish label, Strathberry, is being swamped with orders.

It reminded me of the time when the Queen Elizabeth and Duke of Edinburgh visited Masterton circa 1953 and they lunched at the Empire Hotel in Queen Street. As they drove northward to the next town in their itinerary the butcher next door to the Empire who served the hotel (a Mr Neate) proudly wrote on his window: “The Queen ate our meat.”

Quick as a flash my father came out with a brush and white poster paint and wrote on his butcher’s shop window: “God save the Queen.”

I won’t be going to the wedding. Devotees of Ms Markle’s beauty and acting ability are not automatically on the guest list and about 200 million people will need to die before I am next in line to the throne.

The longest sentence you can form with two words is “I do”. – H. L. Mencken